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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Trump's childish, bullying actions could cause a nuclear war, according to experts

Veterans
of diplomacy and national security and specialists on North Korea fear
that, whatever their intended result, Mr. Trump’s increasingly bellicose
threats and public insults of the famously thin-skinned Mr. Kim could
cause the United States to careen into a nuclear confrontation driven by
personal animosity and bravado.

“It
does matter, because you don’t want to get to a situation where North
Korea fundamentally miscalculates that an attack is coming,” said Sue Mi
Terry, a former intelligence and National Security Council specialist
who is now a senior adviser for Korea at Bower Group Asia. “It could
lead us to stumble into a war that nobody wants.”

And
while his bombast may be a thrill to Mr. Trump’s core supporters, there
is evidence that the broader American public does not trust the
president to deal with North Korea, and is deeply opposed to the kind of
pre-emptive military strike he has seemed eager to threaten.

Some
senior administration officials acknowledge privately that Mr. Trump’s
rhetoric on North Korea is not helpful, although they question whether
it will alter the discussion, given how far Mr. Kim has come in his
quest to develop a nuclear weapon that could reach the United States.

The
three current and retired generals advising Mr. Trump — Jim Mattis, the
defense secretary; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, his national security
adviser; and John F. Kelly, his chief of staff — as well as Rex W.
Tillerson, the secretary of state, have all chosen their words on North
Korea more carefully, emphasizing the role of diplomacy and the grave
stakes of any military confrontation.

“All
three of the generals fully realize the carnage that would result from a
war on the Korean Peninsula,” James G. Stavridis, the former NATO
commander and current dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
at Tufts University, said on Sunday.

“Knowing
each of them personally, I am certain they are counseling operational
caution, measured public commentary and building a coalition approach to
dealing with Kim Jong-un,” Mr. Stavridis, a retired admiral, said in an
email. “But controlling President Trump seems incredibly difficult.
Let’s hope they are not engaged in mission impossible, because the
stakes are so high.”

Christopher
R. Hill, a former ambassador to South Korea who served Republican and
Democratic presidents, argued that the comments could badly undercut Mr.
Trump’s ability to find a peaceful solution to the dispute, playing
into Mr. Kim’s characterization of the United States as an evil nation
bent on North Korea’s destruction and relieving pressure on the Chinese
to do more to curb Pyongyang.

“The
comments give the world the sense that he is increasingly unhinged and
unreliable,” said Mr. Hill, the dean of the Josef Korbel School of
International Studies at the University of Denver.

Mr.
Hill, who as envoy to South Korea under George W. Bush was the last
American to hold formal talks with the government in Pyongyang, said he
and Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, routinely advised Mr.
Bush to “avoid the personal invectives,” because “they never help.”

“My
sense from four years of those talks is that getting personal is not
helpful,” Mr. Hill said. “Who could be telling Trump otherwise?”

Yet
current and former senior officials said it was clear that Mr. Trump
would continue his brinkmanship, particularly his belligerent tweets, no
matter what his advisers do or say. One former administration official,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy
workings, said nobody, including Mr. Kelly, could control the
president’s social media utterances, despite what his military advisers
thought about them.

The
tweets most likely have forced Mr. Mattis and Joseph F. Dunford Jr.,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as other national
security officials, to spend a significant amount of time on the phone
reassuring counterparts about Mr. Trump’s intentions.